Still. Not. Legal.

Okay, so it looks like my Employment Pass has NOT been approved after all. This is a bit annoying. After getting the letter saying the EP was approved, I headed on down to my all time favorite place in the world, the Ministry of Manpower, aka, MOM, to once again get some of that sweet, sweet tender loving care that only MOM can provide. As usual, the bureaucracy threw a spanner in the works.

After asking me to produce some documents saying that I had what was called a Banker’s Guarantee, which more or less means that a certain amount of money has been set aside in a bank account of sorts and will sit there for the duration of my employment. On the off chance that I do something criminal or inexplicably vanish, the money goes to the government. I provided the document and they looked at it and promptly said, “We’re not giving you your EP.”

The reason is, apparently, that the guarantee expires on March 31st. This, I thought, was not a problem, because it also gets renewed on April 3rd, but according to them, that three day gap might allow me to do all kinds of untold havoc on the island for which I would not be covered.

Of course, this is all kind of pointless since I’m leaving on January 11th, and we’d simply renewed the EP–or tried to–a few months back, so I wouldn’t have to keep going in to get my passport stamped over and over again, something that has happened ANYWAY, thanks to the wonderful bureaucracy of MOM. However, there is hope.

All I have to do is quit.

Once I say “Okay, I’m unemployed,” they’ll stamp my passport for two weeks and expect me to be out of the country by then. Since I am now only going to be here for… oh, two more or weeks or less, it looks like this will suit me just fine.

I hate how complicated, slow and contradictary this simple, fast and intuitive system of theirs is. Someone is seriously racking up some bad karma for having successfully marketed that to the public…